The Goddess leads us into the spiral dance of life. She sends forth the winds, the whirling energies that bind existence into eternal motion. Through dance, She teaches her children movement and change.
Merlin Stone, Ancient Mirrors of Womanhood
Without the ritual fixing of a center, there can be no circumference. And with neither center nor circumference where does a person stand?
Joseph Epes Brown, The Roots of Renewal
A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest. . . . Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
Albert Einstein
Time is like a river, flowing endlessly through the universe.
Harlan Ellison
In the ecstasy of dance, man bridges the chasm between this and the other world. . . . We may assume that the circle dance was already a permanent possession of the Paleolithic cultures, the first perceptible stage of human civilization.
Curt Sachs, World History of Dance
When water is still, is like a mirror. . . . And if water thus derives lucidity from stillness, how much more the faculties of mind? The mind of the sage being in repose becomes the mirror of the universe.
Chuang Tzu
It's all changed now. For us, it's come to an end. But, you'll see, when you sleep it'll well up so strongly that you won't know which is the dream. And when, finally, there is nothing left of you, you'll be overpowered by the strength of another time that will -- mark my words -- reclaim you. It will snap you up and pull you under like a trout taking a bug -- all suddenness, all surprise, something silver rising from the depths. And then you may find that it starts all over again, because it has never ended.
Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale
But gathering, as we stray, a sense of Life, so lovely and intense, it lingers when we wander hence, that those who follow feel behind their backs when all before is blind, our joy, a rampart to the mind.
John Masefield, The Passing Strange
We should consider every day lost in which we have not danced at least once.
Nietzsche
Remember, Be Here Now.
Ram Dass
Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together.
Thomas Carlyle
Faith is the bird that sings when the dawn is still dark.
Rabindranath Tagore
In the midst of winter, I discovered within myself the invincible summer.
Albert Camus
May you live all the days of your life.
Jonathan Swift
Because I have been athirst I will dig a well that others may drink.
Arabian Proverb
When spring comes the grass grows by itself.
Lao-Tze, Tao Te Ching
Relinquishing control is the ultimate challenge of the Spiritual Warrior.
Ralph Blum, The Book of Runes
Sitting quietly, doing nothing, Spring comes, and the grass grows by itself.
The Gospel According To Zen
When we inhale, the air comes into the inner world. When we exhale, the air goes out to the outer world. The inner world is limitless, and the outer world is also limitless. We say inner world and outer world, but there is really only one world.
Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind
Just as the moon only reflects its light in a pool, so the mind, empty and unattached, does not know itself and the outside world as two things.
The Gospel According To Zen
As long as you have certain desires and expectations about how it ought to be, you can't see how it is.
Ram Dass
Inner silence is where you find yourself.
Mary Margaret Moore
Do not take life's experiences too seriously. For in reality they are nothing but dream experiences. Play your part in life, but never forget that it is only a role.
Paramahansa Yogananda
Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
Rumi
Who sees the Divine within every creature, deathlessly dwelling amidst the mortal: that person sees truly.
Bhagavad-Gita
Be open to all teachers and all teachings, and listen with your heart.
Ram Dass
As long as we focus on the outside, there will always be that empty, hungry, lost place inside that needs to be filled.
Shakti Gawain
We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the Whole, of which these are shining parts, is the Soul.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The journey begins by quieting one's insides, making room, leaving time to hear and to notice, the practice of spiritual growth has its core in the practice of silence.
John Fortunato
At first you think that your sadhana is a limited part of your life. In time you realize that everything you do is part of your sadhana.
Ram Dass
I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming that I am a man.
Chuang Tzu
Heaven is the space within each one of you that dances in the light.
Twila Thompson
To oppose something is to maintain it.
Ursula Kroeber LeGuin
Though we travel the world to find that which is beautiful, We must carry it with us or we find it not.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes.
Frank Lloyd Wright
When the mind is strong and the heart is pure, you are free.
Paramahansa Yogananda
The day will come when you will realize that the entire universe can be found inside you.
Deepak Chopra
All kinds of seeds of power are within you waiting for you to develop them.
Paramahansa Yogananda
Now there is silence. Seek no further.
Marianne Williamson, A Course In Miracles
The truth waits for eyes unclouded by longing.
Lao-Tze, Tao Te Ching
The key to a passionate life is to trust and follow the energy within us.
Shakti Gawain
We have met the enemy and he is us.
Walt Kelly, Pogo
The whole universe moves in an eternal cosmic rhythm.
Paramahansa Yogananda
There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.
Albert Einstein
We already have what we are seeking. It is there inside us, and if we give it time, it will make itself known to us.
Thomas Merton
Compassion is the basis of all truthful relationships, for it means being present with love ~ for ourselves and for all life, including animals, fish, birds, and trees. Compassion is bringing our deepest truth into our actions, no matter how much the world seems to resist, because that is ultimately what we have to give this world and one another.
Ram Dass
Not to hurt our humble brethren (the animals) is our first duty to them, but to stop there is not enough. We have a higher mission - to be of service to them whenever they require it. If you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men.
Saint Francis of Assisi
In appearance, I am a thing moving about in space. In reality, I am that unmoving space myself.
Doug Harding
What we create within is always mirrored outside us. This is the law of the universe.
Shakti Gawain
The final mystery is oneself.
Oscar Wilde
Only in this silence — the silence that lies behind thought — can one hear the symphony of the universe, can one hear the whisper of the Word, can one approach the inner temple wherein dwells the soul.
Ram Dass
. . . . take the time to listen to your heart. In most ancient and wise cultures it is a regular practice for people to talk to their heart. There are rituals, stories, and meditative skills in every spiritual tradition that awaken the voice of the heart. To live wisely, this practice is essential, because the heart is the source of our connection to and intimacy with all of life. And life is love. This mysterious quality of love is all around us, as real as gravity. . . .
Jack Kornfield
If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.
Jack Kornfield
It is eternity now, I am in the midst of it. It is about me in the sunshine; I am in it, as the butterfly in the light-shaden air. Nothing has to come; it is now. Now is eternity; now is immortal life.
Richard Jeffries
No heaven or earth, just this mysterious place we walk about in dazedly, where being here or there, in time or not, are only two motions of the same ecstatic breathing.
Rumi
. . .This little space within the heart is as great as this vast universe. The heavens and the earth are there, and the sun and the moon and the stars; fire and lightening and wind are there, and all that now is and is not yet - all that is contained within it.
Chandogya Upanishad (8,3)
All things are living; all things are dancing in the rhythm of eternal harmony.
Paramahansa Yogananda
Awhile we walk the world on its wide roads and narrow ways, and they pass by, the countless shadowy troops of nights and days; we know them not, O happy heart, for you and I watch where within a slow dawn lightens up another sky.
Susan Mitchell
Few reach the fields of delight till great time, when the cycles have run their courses on high, take the inbred pollution, and leave to us only the bright sense of the heaven's own ether, and fire from the springs of the boundless sky.
Virgil
The road that will take us forward is also the road that will take us inward.
Colin Wilson, Beyond the Occult
Just listen with the vastness of the world in mind; you can't fail to get the message.
Pierre Boulez
The stars are setting and the Caravan starts for the Dawn of Nothing. Oh, make haste!
Omar Khayyam
Those who are awake live in a state of constant amazement . . . .
Jack Kornfield
All things are known, but most things are forgotten. It takes a special magic to remember them.
Robert Holdstock, Lavondyss
The thing to remember is that artists are magical beings. They're the only people other than gods who can grant immortality.
Matt Ruff, Fool on the Hill
I sort of feel that the whole universe is sacred, and that wherever we are is sacred and we are sacred in it. When you get the harmony of that, it's really cool.
Camille Bacon-Smith
I do not know how I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and again finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
Sir Isaac Newton
The day will come when, after harnessing the wind, the waves, and the tides, we shall harness the power of love. And on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.
Henry Beston
There's music in the sighing of a reed; There's music in the gushing of a rill; There's music in all things, if men had ears: their earth is but an echo of the spheres.
Lord Byron
Let your life lightly dance on the edges of time like dew on the tip of a leaf.
Rabindranath Tagore
There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. That will be the beginning.
Louis L'Amour
here is the deepest secret nobody knows (here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows higher than soul can hope or mind can hide) and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart).
e. e. cummings
There's music in the sighing of a reed; There's music in the gushing of a rill; There's music in all things, if men had ears: Their earth is but an echo of the spheres.
Lord Byron
Be wise, be wild, be blessed . . . .Walk in peace and find your stars . . . .
Poppy Palin
Most people know intuitively that when you fall in love, the world is full of magic. What they don't know is that when you discover the universe is full of magic, you fall in love with the world.
Phyllis Curott, The Book of Shadows
Whether we name divine presence synchronicity, serendipity, or graced moment matters little. What matters is the reality that our hearts have been understood. Nothing is as real as a healthy dose of magic which restores our spirits.
Nancy Long
There are many paths to the top of the mountain, but the view is always the same.
Chinese Proverb
The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest of wilderness.
John Muir
Walk on a rainbow trail. Walk on a trail of song, and there will be beauty all around you. There is a way out of every shadowed mist over a rainbow trail.
Navajo Song
Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.
John Muir
Once in a while you find a place on earth that becomes your very own. A place undefined. Waiting for you to bring your color, your self. A place untouched, unspoiled, undeveloped. Raw, honest, and haunting. No one, nothing is telling you how to feel or who to be. Let the mountains have you for a day . . . ."
Sundance
In Celtic thought, a so-called thin place was a transition zone: where earth meets sky on a mountaintop; where land meets ocean at the coast or (better yet) on an island; where the wilderness meets domestic land as at the edge of a moor; or where things beneath the earth come to the surface at a holy well. Thin places carried power. They were places of encounter with the divine.
Mel Schlachter
The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
Bertrand Russell
The time of darkness is past. The winter solstice brings the victory of light. After decay comes the turning point. The powerful light which was banished returns. There is movement, but it is not brought about by force.
The I Ching, (Fu, The Turning Point)
Now we are no longer primitive; now the whole world seems not-holy. We have drained the light from the boughs in the sacred grove and snuffed it in the high places and along the banks of the sacred streams. We as a people have moved from pantheism to pan-atheism.
Annie Dillard
The spider web and the Brooklyn Bridge are both the work of nature. We must learn how the delicate dynamics of this unlikely relationship work. The earth's heart is big enough to hold both. The question is, how big is the heart that we manifest?
John Daido Loori, Making Love With Light
I, the fiery life of divine essence, am aflame beyond the beauty of the meadows, I gleam in the waters, and I burn in the sun, moon, and stars. . . . I awaken everything to life.
Hildegarde of Bingen
When society speaks, all men listen. When mountains speak, wise men listen.
John Muir
I am one, I am many. I am as we are — eternal, out of time. I am science and magic, chimeric, ethereal. I am no one, I am legion. I am Saltimbanco.
Cirque de Soleil, Saltimbanco
When we are alone on a starlit night, when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children, when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet, Basho, we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash - at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the "newness," the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, all these provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.
Thomas Merton
We know we have found our own talisman when we touch an image or presence that lifts us out of our material world and carries us so high above it that we begin to see the threads that connect us to the rest of the universe.
Mary Dike Midkiff, She Flies Without Wings
May you find joy in your creations, may all your lessons be gentle, and may fulfillment grace your life.
Moyra Lindner
I am kindred to dragons, and a companion to owls.
The Bible, Job 30:29
Our magical circle is the great ring of the circling stars. They are our kindred and sources of our mundane power, if we learn that Light is not just illumination to see by, but a path to follow, and a lantern which each of us in turn can take up and so guide the footsteps of others wandering in the lonely dark.
Marion Green, A Witch Alone
In the earliest time, when both people and animals lived on the earth, a person could become an animal if he wanted to, and an animal could become a human being. Sometimes they were people and sometimes animals and there was no difference. All spoke the same language. That was the time when words were like magic. The human mind had mysterious powers. A word spoken by chance might have strange consequences. It could come suddenly alive and what people wanted to happen could happen — all you had to do was say it. Nobody can explain this. That's the way it was.
Edward Field, Songs and Stories of the Netsilik Eskimos
Long before writing was invented, human beings read their world. They interpreted their dreams and the flights of birds. They read the intestines of sacrificial animals and the memories of their ancestors. They read the things that surprised them, or the things that reminded them of something else. Most of all, they read in the places where there were holes — spaces — gaps. They filled up the blanks of the universe, as though they were pages, with writing. Leonardo advised aspiring artists to "discover" the pictures to be found in the cracks in walls; Chinese sages were conceived as their mothers stepped into the footprints of unicorns; all of us make up our lives out of the cracks in the walls or our past memories and the unicorn footprints of our futures. The making of a life is similar to the making of a text. We live by reading our own stories.
Linda Sexson, Ordinarily Sacred
Whatever we do in our lives, we make a text of our lives. Whether or not our stories belong to the shared patterns of the great, true stories — the myths — they are the texts from which we find out our relation to the divine, to one another and to the self.
Linda Sexson, Ordinarily Sacred
Once upon a time our ancestors weren't just a genetic tracing or a geneological search . . . once upon a time they were pulsing breathing beings whose lives and deeds became song and the song was sung and sung until its rhythms became a liturgy . . . a mysterious fascination in which the singer and his audience and their ancestors were together in time, together in the hunt, together in darkened caves around embers of eternal fires. And the ancestors truly danced among them on the earth. And man was not alone. It was the time of the storyteller and the sacred fire circle. It was a time when dreams lived people instead of people "having" dreams.
Jerrilee Cain, Hestia Come Home
A general definition of civilization; a civilized society is exhibiting the fine qualities of truth, beauty, adventure, art, peace.
Alfred North Whitehead
I have seen landscapes...which, under a particular light, made me feel that at any moment a giant might raise his head over the next ridge. Nature has that in her which compels us to invent giants: and only giants will do.
C.S. Lewis
The mythic truth is the whole truth.
P.L. Travers
It is in the speech of carters and housewives, in the speech of blacksmiths and old women, that one discovers the magic that sings the claim of the voice in the shadow, or that chants the rhyme of the fish in the well.
John Maruskin
Nel mezzo del cammin di mostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, che la diritta via era smarrita. "Midway in life's journey, I went astray from the straight road and awoke to find myself alone in a dark wood where the right road was wholly lost."
Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, Canto 1
Page updated on June 6, 2002
